US Will Never Be Majority Minority Because Immigrants Assimilate Into Anti-Blackness Photo: In this Dec. 18, 2018 photo, students participate in a pre-kindergarten class at Alice M. Harte Charter School in New Orleans. Charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated, are often located in urban areas with large back populations, intended as alternatives to struggling city schools. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
One complaint in Black America is that it seems it is always under attack — even from other Black people or people of color. Even immigrants feed into and adopt anti-Blackness, according to Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley. Black Americans are sometimes looked down upon by African and Caribbean immigrants, and Latino immigrants often latch onto conservative and racist political rhetoric, some in Black America complain.
U.S. census data from 2020 shows a decade-long loss in the number of white Americans who do not identify with other racial and ethnic groups. This means that all of the 2010-to-2020 U.S. population growth is attributable to Black people and people of color—those identifying as Black, Latino or Hispanic, Asian American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and Native American, Brookings reported. Together, these groups now represent more than 40 percent of the U.S. population.
That would suggest the U.S. is moving toward a majority-minority population.
However, Stanley tweeted, “The United States will NEVER be majority minority. Every immigrant community assimilates to some degree, which in many cases means assimilating into anti-Black racial stereotypes, because that’s what assimilation is tragically often taken to be.”
West African immigrants from Nigeria have a slur to describe Black Americans and U.S.-born Nigerians –“akata.” A West African term from the Yoruba tribe, akata is not a term of endearment.
The 2020 presidential election showed a surprising number of immigrants voting for Donald Trump despite his often bigoted and racist language. Haitian Americans were among those who turned out for Trump, even though he once described Haiti and African countries as “shithole” countries.
Trump’s support among Latino immigrants was much higher than initially thought in 2020. He outperformed his 2016 results among Latino voters, earning the support of about one in three nationwide, The New York Times reported.
Part of Latinos’ racial understanding is shedding the idea that “Blackness is something else that is U.S.-based” and “doesn’t directly affect our Afro-Latino brothers and sisters,” said Fordham University law professor Tanya Hernandez, in an NBC News interview. Hernandez wrote the book “On Latino Anti-Black Bias: ‘Racial Innocence’ & The Struggle for Equality.”
Latinos “need to stop acting as if our ethnicity shields us from any implications regarding racial issues,” Hernandez said. “An ethnic group is not impervious to issues of racism simply because they, too, are victims of racialization.”
A quarter of all U.S. Latinos identify as Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, or of African descent with roots in Latin America, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey. However, large numbers of Afro-Latinos don’t identify as Black. Only 18 percent of Afro-Latinos said they were Black, compared to 39 percent who identified as white, Pew found. Almost a quarter (24 percent) said their race was “Hispanic” — which is an ethnicity, not a race.
“As the daughter of Cuban refugees, I was raised to resist oppression and champion liberty. But when the Black Lives Matter movement roared into South Florida, asking us to end systemic racism and police brutality, I was caught off guard,” admitted Washington Post contributing columnist Lizette Alvarez. “I hadn’t fully realized the subtle ways that racism thrives in Miami, my hometown, a place dominated by a white Latino supermajority. We are a community built by people who have fled despotism in our home countries, yet we have ignored injustice in Black neighborhoods a few miles away. And I — educated, liberal, supposedly enlightened — have been as guilty as anyone.”
D. C. Matthew @DCMatthew1 agreed with part of Prof. Stanley’s tweet that immigrants assimilate into anti-Black racial stereotypes. “I agree with this. Sociologist George Yancey has a good book on it. But black immigrants are, well, immigrants too, and they mostly assimilate into Black America.”
Dr. Mansa Keita @rasmansa, who holds a computer science Ph.D., pondered, “What I wonder is if the category of ‘white’ will be redefined and expanded to include others to maintain the position. I wonder what cost that will come at.”
Cultural economic strategist Mike Green tweeted, “History matters. The US was established as a whites-only nation on a continent already occupied by 500+ nations of nonwhite populations. The fight to keep this nation under the hostile power of whiteness is at the core of most all political battles.” Green is a co-facilitator with Common Ground Conversations on Race in America, an educational service that offers safe transformative conversations on racial equity.
Somebody Call The Aliens STAT @lifeandmorelife replied to Professor Stanley, tweeting, “Nope. That IS exactly what assimilation means in this country. Racism & Capitalism. And without racism, you cannot have capitalism. All the systems, institutions, the society, the corporations, the military, government and economy are built on it & dependent upon it.”
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